Monthly Archives: March 2007

JERUSALEM, March 31 â€” Hamas, the dominant faction in the Palestinian government, is building its military capacity in the Gaza Strip, constructing tunnels and underground bunkers and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives, senior Israeli officials say.

The officials, including a top military commander who spoke in an interview on Friday, said that Hamas had learned tactics from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which brought in and stored thousands of rockets in bunkers near the northern Israeli border before its war with Israel last summer.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-controlled terrorist organization operating inside Lebanon, continues to grow in strength and to endanger the U.N.-brokered â€œcease-fireâ€ in southern Lebanon. The U.N. arms embargo has not been enforced and the terrorist organization continues to rearm, receiving arms shipments from Syria. The threat to Israel and to Lebanese sovereignty looms greater than ever.

“It’s completely outrageous for any nation to go out and arrest the servicemen of another nation in waters that don’t belong to them.” So spoke Admiral Sir Alan West, former First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, concerning the present Anglo-Iranian crisis over captured British soldiers. But if the attack was “outrageous,” it was apparently not quite outrageous enough for anything to have been done about it yet.

ST. PETERSBURG: I live in Vladimir Putin’s hometown, not far from the palaces of the czars, but on a windowsill in my apartment, I have a phone that lives in New York.

It makes and receives calls on a New York City area code as surely as a phone in a takeout joint on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, never letting on that it is an eight-hour flight away from its supposed stomping ground. Dial my New York number, the same one that I’ve had for a decade, and you’ll be connected to me in St. Petersburg with such speed that you’ll suspect that this whole expatriate-in-Russia thing is a sham.

All these attitudes began to change in 2001, when the CIA and the Air Force rigged a few Predators with Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Suddenly, a UAV could do more than just float over a target for 20 hours at a time, watching and taking pictures, already a significant asset. It could also be a killer.

What a difference a missile makes. Nowadays, drone pilots get treated better. Predator flight time counts the same and pays the same as time in a fighter. When Major Rogers got the chance to command a squadron after four years at the Air Force Academy and a dozen years behind the stick of F-15s and other jets, he didn’t care at all that his planes would be thousands of miles away, or that he wouldn’t be able to feel turbulence or smell a burning engine. “Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night,” he says.

Washington, D.C. (AHN) – The United States and Japan are signing new defensive agreements and evolving their military alliance to defend against new threats.

Commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce A. Wright, says the shift will move from traditional warfare to the defense against a missile attack from neighbors like North Korea or China. “It’s just an improvement in defense capabilities. There is no expansion of U.S. or Japanese forces involved,” General Wright says.

MOSCOW – The weakness of western powers and the international community was exposed once again last week after Iran arrested British sailors and marines it claimed had strayed into Iranian territorial waters.

One Iranian official has said that if the United Kingdom does not admit that the sailors were in Iranian waters, they would be charged with spying, which, he added, carries the death penalty in Iran.